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Chicago researchers raced Monday to find ways of keeping the looted treasures of Iraq's ancient civilizations from leaving that country, joining a growing call for the United States to help buy back and return thousands of items stolen from Iraq's national museum.

Students at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, a center of research on that region's antiquities, were scanning photographs from old Iraqi museum catalogs to alert border guards and art dealers to artifacts from the National Museum of Iraq. Looters ransacked an irreplaceable repository of ancient Mesopotamian culture at the museum in the days after U.S. troops captured Baghdad.

An emergency meeting of UNESCO, the cultural arm of the United Nations, was scheduled for Thursday in Paris, where experts will plot strategy for keeping the priceless collection from disappearing into the international black market.

"We are calling upon all the governments of the world to ban the trade in Iraqi antiquities," said McGuire Gibson, a professor of Mesopotamian archeology at the U. of C., who will attend the UNESCO conference.

Many archeologists also vented frustration at the U.S. military's failure to protect the collection, saying the loss could amount to a war crime under the 1956 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Monday that the U.S. "understands its obligations" and will "participate in restoring that which has been broken."

The destruction of ancient culture appears to be on a vast scale unmatched in the modern era, scholars said.

The looters took up to 170,000 statues, clay tablets, pottery pieces and jewelry pieces stretching back more than 5,000 years to the first stirrings of human civilization. Many of those artifacts could be saved if the powers governing Iraq move quickly to grant amnesty and reasonable rewards for returning the items, said Jane Waldbaum, president of the Archaeological Institute of America.

"You want to be sure you don't encourage yet more looting," Waldbaum said. "Logistically it's difficult--Who will establish the value of the items? Who will be in charge of the fund?--but it might be a practical way to recover at least some of this material."

Minor works could be the first to appear on the black market. Though the collection included many masterpieces of incalculable value, archeologists said such pieces would be too well-known to sell easily.

The masterpieces include a mask from 3300 B.C. of the Sumerian goddess Inanna, thought to be one of the earliest pieces of professional sculpture ever produced. One of the best-known works believed to be lost is a 4,300-year-old bronze mask of an Akkadian king that is featured in many, if not most, books of ancient art history.

"It would be like trying to fence the Mona Lisa," said Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute. "There's a good chance that those things will be recovered."

Experts said some of the secure vaults at the museum were opened without explosives, suggesting that some of the looters were insiders who knew what to look for. Researchers fear that means some sophisticated looters already had wealthy buyers lined up for the most precious artifacts.

"There are people who will buy those things, and they'll hide it, just as if they had the Mona Lisa," said Gibson, who is head of the American Association for Research in Baghdad. "That kind of collecting is a mania."

Some artifacts most important to scholars would be worth little on the market. Such items may simply be thrown away, said Elizabeth Stone, a Mesopotamia scholar at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Other artifacts with delicate gold decoration probably will be melted down, experts said.

Lost are thousands of clay tablets with inscriptions in cuneiform, one of the first known writing systems, dating to earlier than 3000 B.C.

Some of the tablets chronicle the Sumerian tale of Gilgamesh, perhaps the oldest surviving epic. Other unadorned tablets contain insights into ancient life available nowhere else--records of adoption, marriage, even children's school lessons.

Gibson and other scholars are working with the State Department to send out word about what types of pieces are missing, with particular attention to screening people leaving Iraq.

Yet Gibson had spoken at length with the same officials in the months before the war started in an effort to forestall precisely the sort of cultural loss that unfolded at the museum. Gibson noted ruefully that the U.S. military assigned men to chip away the disrespectful mural of former President George Bush on the floor of the Al Rashid Hotel, yet failed to save the matchless legacy of the museum.

Several archeologists said the U.S. failure to prevent looting violates at least the spirit of the 1956 Hague Convention, which calls for special measures in wartime to preserve places and artifacts of cultural significance.

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